1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of information technology, and more particularly relates to high performance, enterprise-level backup and disaster recovery systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Recent events have proved that the need to recover quickly from disasters (both man-made and natural) is critical. Enterprise-level backup and disaster recovery systems are directed at this need. Under the current state of the art, the typical end product of a backup operation is a backup volume that must go through a relatively lengthy “restore” process before it can be used in production.
There do exist some “short downtime” backup and recovery solutions, but they generally require expensive server clustering and/or replication capabilities.
The state of the art with respect to the present application is documented in the publications of the Storage Networking Industry Association (“SNIA”), which are accessible online at www.snia.org. See in particular “Examination of Disk Based Data Protection Technologies” by Michael Rowan, of Revivio Corporation; “Identifying and Eliminating Backup System Bottlenecks” by Jacob Farmer of Cambridge Computer Corporation; “Technologies to Address Contemporary Data Protection” by Michael Fishman of EMC Corporation; and “Next Generation Business Continuity” by Andrea Chiaffitelli of AT&T Corp. (each of which references is incorporated by reference).
As will be appreciated from a review of the references cited above, the current state of the art does not provide a method short of large-scale server clustering and/or replication for making recent point-in-time snapshots of a system available for use on an immediate basis in the event of a system failure or disaster.
It would be desirable, therefore, to have a system implemented with simple hardware that provides the capability so that an organization at any given time could have a recent set of self-consistent images of its production servers available that, in the event of a system failure or disaster, could be brought online and into active production on a more-or-less instantaneous basis.